The present invention relates to a communication system which can exchange information between electronic information media such as e-mail media and the like, and facsimile media.
Recently, in addition to information exchange means such as facsimile, telephone, and the like via the telephone network, information retrieval of electronic information such as e-mails and the like via the Internet has prevailed. Paying attention to e-mails, not only character information but also various other data formats such as image data, audio data, computer data, and the like can be exchanged. Each e-mail user has his or her own postoffice (or a mailbox (P.B.O)) in an e-mail server equipped in a given company. E-mails sent to the individual users are temporarily stored in their postoffices. After that, these e-mails are received by e-mail client software installed in a personal computer (to be referred to as a PC hereinafter) or the like in an office, which is connected to the e-mail server via a LAN or the Internet, or directly to the telephone network.
Furthermore, a communication apparatus or facsimile server apparatus called “Internet FAX” that combines the facsimile apparatus and e-mail function has become available.
The Internet FAX apparatus is principally used as an equipment called a network scanner for capturing read image data into a computer. The Internet FAX apparatus has a function of converting image data captured by reading an original into an e-mail data format, and transmitting that data to a desired e-mail address designated by the transmitting side. This service is called an Internet FAX mail transmission service.
On the other hand, as for a function of receiving facsimile image data by the Internet FAX apparatus or facsimile server apparatus, the received image data cannot be transmitted to the e-mail address designated by the transmitting facsimile apparatus. For example, the following system is already available. That is, facsimile server apparatuses introduced in a given enterprise are connected to each other via an intranet, and a certain server receives facsimile data, which contains a telephone number (to be referred to as a secondary telephone number hereinafter) of the final destination facsimile apparatus. That server selects another server, which can make the communication charge lowest, by looking up a telephone charge table based on the secondary telephone number, and telephone numbers of local servers.
In the above-mentioned prior art, the Internet FAX apparatus can designate an e-mail address. However, in the Internet FAX secondary relaying service, a normal facsimile apparatus (a normal G3 facsimile apparatus) that facsimile-transmits data to the primary relaying Internet FAX apparatus cannot designate the e-mail address of the secondary relaying side. For example, the normal facsimile apparatus cannot post the received data to a user's e-mail postoffice (mailbox) via the Internet FAX apparatus, or cannot manually select the Internet FAX apparatus serving as the secondary relaying station using the Internet FAX secondary relaying service. This is because the e-mail address is described using alphanumeric letters, but a normal facsimile apparatus that complies with the existing ITU-T T0.30 recommendation cannot directly transmit code data of a character string such as alphabets to the destination facsimile apparatus. Note that code data of a character string can be sent in an own company mode (own mode) using a non-standard protocol (NSF/NSS) of the T0.30 recommendation, but facsimile apparatuses with which the server can communicate are limited.